


soldiers in petticoats

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - 20th Century, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Suffragettes, Ben softens to the cause pretty quickly but his hands are more tied than he'd like, Cop Ben Solo, F/M, Just wait until Leia shows up..., London, Sapphic Suffragette Tallie and Paige, Soft Ben Solo's Feminist Awakening, Suffragette Rey, a lot of flowery dialogue about old-school and outdated feminism, cop/prisoner but like in a bouncy romcom way they don't fuck when she's captive or anything, the sexual tension between worthy adversaries
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2019-10-01 04:43:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17237636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: Rey Niima is an oft-arrested Suffragette fighting for the cause. Ben Solo is a policeman just trying to do his job.Hopefully without getting hit with a parasol.His reluctant affection for a certain routine prisoner forces him to examine his place in the world while she boldly forges for her own; through a vast amount of property damage, embroidery, and rebellion.





	1. Chapter 1

"One does not expect to be comfortable in prison."

-Emmeline Pankhurst

 

“....can’t say anything worthy of note came from her arrest. We found a few embroideries, but they're all of the ones we've picked up before; commemorating their arrests, like it's a bloody honor. I don't understand these women. Mitaka’s got a blackened eye, but we can’t blame the lady for responding accordingly to any rough treatment...”

Hux’s tone is piteous as he twirls the keys in his gloved fingers. “Perhaps she feared for her virtue when she used force to resist arrest. Of course injuries on all sides can attest that the gentler sex are not suited these public displays. I don’t know who taught them to start flinging bricks like rioting farmhands; but more time with civilized people might breed that out of _this one.”_

A face pokes up from under the tilted-down flowered hat.

Seated on the low, rotted bench in her cell, the young woman clad in ethereal white lace slouches, her hair frizzing in curls around her cheeks as the only sign she's even a bit eschew, and waits.

Patiently.

Doesn’t even glance at the clock. She is worlds away from the jail that houses her. The only sign of distress seems to be her clenched teeth.

Officer Ben Solo rubs the bridge of his nose when Hux places the brick with another swirly-scripted Suffrage Manifesto strung to it on his desk; hurled through the window of a fashionable hat shop and the only needed piece of evidence in this brisk after-lunch investigation.

The case is quiet cut-and-dry, as is her sentencing:

Notify whatever man was responsible for her and have her taken home to be dealt with under his authority. 

He stuffs the embroidery Hux seized in his pocket; maybe to try to find the plans for repeat offenders amongst them. But mostly he is bored with the procedure that is becoming far too common for his liking. 

He approaches her with his paperwork.

“Miss?”

“Niima,” her chin rests in her palm. She barely glances at him. “Rey Niima.”

“Who shall be collecting you from our custody, Miss Niima?”

“My employer, should I require bail.”

“And under what position are you employed?”

She straightens her spine proudly.

“I am the private tutor of two small girls.”

Valuing education in such a way did imply she was not granted access to it easily; perhaps a relative educated her, somewhat distantly, or she truly sharpened her teeth through public education and worked her way up to be a private tutor. She may be lovely, with the fine slant of afternoon light pouring into her cell, but she was deeply entrenched in danger beyond her own understanding.

Tutor to an upper-class household; how well her position will stand with an arrest for vandalism tarnishing her reputation. He often saw this with the Suffragettes of her class. The wealthier ones had husbands to bail them out and afternoons to fill with something a bit more exciting than tea time; the ones who had jobs to uphold, families to support, always dropped off of the cause after the first arrests.

One dismissal without a reference could destroy an unmarried woman’s entire ability to support herself in this city. Hopefully this was the scare she needed, the proper shake, to keep herself safe...

He hopes Rey will take this to heart. She was hurting herself more than the law.

He didn’t mind their aims; but the public nuisance of it all, the property damage…

His job is to uphold the law, and she was breaking it. The issue was perfectly clear to him.

And he had to find that blasted leader of theirs, in hiding again, rallying these troops of women to march and disobey and _break._

There wasn’t much a girl like her _couldn’t_ take from a man like him by using a soft voice; but had everything to lose by raising it.

He fills out the forms dutifully without stating the obvious, that her career could be in jeopardy from her actions, saving judgement for those responsible of giving it to her.

His job was just paperwork and the occasional handcuffing of drunk or disorderly conduct. A bit dry, really, not quite what he had hoped when joining the force, but novels do romanticize these things. Though this summer, with the fair season, made for quite the disorderly pack of young ladies in London wearing green, purple, and white.

“You have been accused of destruction of property, which could result in a fine of upwards of...”

Miss Niima is nodding along, staring off into space. Clearly ignoring him.

He lowers his papers.

“Do you _confess_ to this crime?”

She wields her eyes like a sword, and when they clap on his he is not prepared for her sharpness.

“Have you charged me with it?”

He rubs the sleep from his eyes. Paperwork. Just a lot of paperwork.

Ben heaves a defeated sigh.

“May I entertain that there was a _reason_ that you broke the window?”

 _“Hmm,”_ she smiles, as though only needing to be asked:

“Bazine Netal was willed that hat shop by her father, owned by her father’s father, and the father before that. The whole family studied at Parisian design schools to learn the craft, it was just as much in her blood as any man’s. It was a _divine_ little shop; she ran it well, the trade suited her. Then she married, and her property was absorbed by her ogre of a husband. He immediately sold it to a tailor, who before acquiring this trade in women’s fashion, previously made butcher’s aprons. He’s been marring the windows with the ugliest designs.”

“There was a Suffragette pamphlet attached to the brick you threw,” Ben’s pen pauses over the lines on his papers he is _supposed_ to be filling in with her complete statement; but he finds he can’t write her words as they happen. “And you’re telling me you threw that brick wrapped with _political literature_ at the shop over a petty grudge over the change in owners?”

She folds her gloved hands tenderly on her lap. There were scrapes on her cheek and her torn skirt shows several inches of petticoats; but one was almost able to forget that when she drew up her composure to that suiting a pretty young lady.

She pouts, as though searching her mind for the answer-

“Considering my delicate state and fragile mind, perhaps I threw it because I was merely prone to fits over those odious hats?” she blinks innocently at him. “Or could I even lift the brick to throw it at all, being merely a-?”

“You bruised up one of my best sergeants in your _quite delicate_ state,” he drops his eyes from her, “so playacting as a foolish maid is not a guise I’ll fall for from you, Miss Niima.”

She smirks up at him, unafraid.

“And yet you misunderstand my confession just as you claim to not be fooled.”

“Not precisely. There are witnesses who gave statements that you screamed ‘Votes for Women’ before smashing the window.”

She laughs to herself.

“But you assume it was foolishness that made me break something, Officer Solo. You think we are children; who scream and break our toys to try and get that which we want. All Policemen, lawmakers, _men alike_ think that we are simply making a mess. Bazine lost what should have been safely hers, by law, through her husband absorbing her identity, her property, her entire self. How can we, who stand to lose everything to you, possibly understand the value of a shop? Of a window? We aspire only to show you that we will not respect the things we are not entitled to value any longer until we are given the chance to possess our own property; and will no longer obey the laws that we have no say in the writings of.”

He blinks at her, snapping the paperwork shut in his ledger. With a tense swallow, he smoothes the front of his felt uniform jacket.

“It is my job to uphold the law, Miss, not to write it.”

“As a recognized citizen with rights in this society. We women do not ask to dominate it. But to share it.”

He bumps against the bars at his chest. He doesn’t know when he drew so close to them. He tightens a gloved fist around the metal.

“Consider this a warning, Miss Niima.”

She seems as surprised as him for the decree.

Ben clears his throat. _“For a first time offense.”_

“I cannot promise that you have broken me of this cause, Officer.”

It never did, with these bloody Suffragettes. They heralded their sisters in prison; hosted teas for them, made them medals of honor. Perhaps if they saw a day of true war, they wouldn't be so comfortable making their own.

He folds the closed ledger under his arm.

“There are other ways to get what you want. _Gentler_ ways,” he coughs, blushing, and dropping his eyes from her at the suggestion, “your entire cause would benefit in learning that we do not need to turn women into men to see them as our equals. Thus, I will regard you with the decency that befits your sex.”

He unlocks the cell door. A cluster of painted ladies also awaiting their bail, that will likely never come, glare daggers at him as he lets a primly-dressed suffragette waltz out of his prison.

She adjusts her hat, knowing she will walk out with much more hair loose than she had intended when she styled it this morning. But her face is sunny at the turn of events; the ability to walk free. If only for a moment. 

She regards him carefully as he leads her through the office, where a freshly-bruised Mitaka gapes at him, wickedly outraged by her walking free so soon. Officer Solo retrieves her parasol for her, as a gentleman should when a lady made her leave, from the evidence pile on his desk, and offered it to her with careful consideration.

Miss Niima has no reactions to the decorum that demanded he treat her preciously. It flares something odd inside him, a sharp fire; her indifference to things that made other young ladies blush is a slight that offends him as though his sensibilities were as delicate as...

Well, she was not the type for delicate sensibilities, so clearly lacking her own. Rough, mean-spirited Suffragette. She might be pretty, but she would have no luck snagging a husband when she was so cold, and then how silly would she look in that dress?

She adjusts her hat and straightens her skirt before he leads her toward the door.

“If I simply walked up to you on the street and told you my thoughts, would you entertain them? Or would you run from them? I have your attention now, your free discussion, and-”

“I am not the judge you need to convince, Miss. Nor the parliament.”

He escorts her crisply out of the station. 

"Good day."

"See you soon," she shakes her head sadly, as though pitying him. 

He merely bows his head. His mother taught him chivalry. Even the bloody Suffragettes.

She is unimpressed with her freedom as they release her from the cage in the jailor’s office; as unimpressed as anyone who feels that freedom is a right, not a privilege.


	2. Chapter 2

The second time he catches her off the streets himself, amongst the riotous crowd. 

How an afternoon stroll of a crowd of well-dressed women with parasols could turn so quickly into chaos is beyond him. 

His own face is flushed, hair unkempt, and she is relatively cool as he leads her with a hand around her arm to the station for her now-routine detention. 

“That employer fond of bailing you out, or have you had to seek a new position?”

His temper is not as fine as he’d like, in the presence of a fashionable, if rebellious, young lady such as herself. 

Miss Niima keeps her chin high.

“I am kept in the household of one Mr. Kenobi; he has two young grandchildren to care for and has entrusted me with the privilege of my education in order to provide it for those girls thoroughly. But my weekends are my own, Officer Solo.”

“And how you waste them,” he grits his teeth as she slumps against his hold. She’s really making him drag her, and he has half a mind to toss her over his shoulder and carry her the rest of the way.

“This is really not what I expected from an Officer of your rank,” she’s breathless, a little pleased with herself, “isn’t it procedure to handcuff a suspect?”

He doesn't want to be doing this to begin with. She's more...precious than all this, to him. A very lovely creature who has been twisted by the bile of these hyenas in petticoats. Perhaps she seeks the right partner, the right teacher...

“I find it indelicate when handling a young lady.”

Her laugh mocks him, he bristles. He is used to women laughing at him. His fellow officers know an easy way to blow out his temper is a mention of his bachelorhood. His mother often told him growing up that his face was dignified, a profile belonging on a minted coin. But mostly, his fleeting and awkward pursuits, had led to laughing.

Laughter of that nature has come out at him as equally cruel from women in lace and styled hair before; but never so biting as hers.

"I'm your prisoner."

“I haven't _charged you-_ Perhaps we wish you would comply with the investigation involving those windows.”

“What about protest tells you that I’ll be compliant? Or that you even want me to be?”

“So you’ll talk. You had accomplices,” he tightens his grip on her arm, “unless the true crime I must charge you with would be witchcraft. No one could hit windows of three sides of that building at the speed you did. You had help.”

They round that third corner, where she would have had to start at in the three seconds it took for all the windows to shatter. Of course, that’s not where he found her; much too far away to be the only one to be a part of the smashing. The help she had had gotten away.

“Don’t you want to hear _why_ I broke all the windows this time?” she baits, her voice light and airy and...alive.

She is pleased to her core of what she’s done. Her arrest just seems to be...part of her victory. 

“I know that you did not, for starters,” annoyed, he does turn her to face a nearby brick wall. One hand holds her small hands tight behind her, the other braces on the wall by her head as he catches his breath. 

“Hands on the wall,” he warns, trying to even out how flustered he feels by her ribbing him. She does obey, somewhat demurely, and he stares for a second at her palms scratching the muddy brick, actually listening to him.

She looks over her shoulder at him, confused as to why he’s hesitating. 

His ears turn red. 

Then he digs at his belt for his handcuffs. 

He feels bizarre, and people are staring, because she is just a little thing next to him, being cuffed like a common drunk. It makes him, and the entire police force, look brutish. His face turns red when the cuffs click her hands into place behind her back, and she seems all the more pleased with the murmurs surrounding them. 

As though  _ he’s _ the one committing the crime.

Which is probably why she was trying to get him to do it. Conniving suffragettes were very aware of their optics. It’s why they dressed up for their protests. It’s why they went on hunger strikes. It’s why they spat at officers and baited them with lewd and unmanly accusations so any mistreatment of them would look like someone’s poor sweet daughter got cuffed in her God-fearing mouth.

Ge grits his teeth and does his job as he is required to.

Leading her is more graceful, and running from him more futile, when she is bound. Her head is held high and proud as they walk in their promenade to the station.

“That establishment, if you must know, is a private psychiatrist.”

“Your torments to the working men and business owners in this city will never cease,” he replies dryly, one hand around her cuffs, the other guiding her shoulder. Even though less people are watching their procession, her hat not even reaching his chin does make him feel monstrous, dragging her over the cobblestones. 

Miss Niima laughs again, but she’s not taunting him. It’s crueler, because she is in awe of how he saw the world. 

“Dr. Sidon’s professional opinion can be bought and sold as easily as a hat; how clever you are, Officer. Does your wife not eat? She must be mad. Does she cry over your mistreatment? She must be mad. Does she have a family fortune you’d like to make off with? The diagnosis is all the same, and all those wives sit in a madhouse and no one speaks their names again. Madness vanishes us all.”

He pauses, looking back at the smashed windows. It’s a bleak place; grim and gray. Business as usual, even as the proprietor yells in the street to Hux about the damages, continues as an aptly-timed pair walks up the front steps. A man leading a distressed looking woman, somewhat forcefully. 

Like he’s taking her to a prison.

Like how he leads Rey.

His hands soften their grip on her. 

“These are crimes not righted by what you are doing,” he growls, and the station is thankfully in sight. Into a jailer’s cell she will go, and his headache can relieve itself in his office.

“These wives have one advocate; their husbands. What can be done when the person who owns you does not face consequences?"  She twists in his arm. “This is beyond law, Officer Solo, I see you have compassion for what is truly right, even if enforcing it evades you. Please.”

He stops.

“Please what?”

She falls short herself of what she wants from him. She doesn’t want him to just let her go; she was _ trying  _ to get arrested.

“My cause...see  _ reason _ in my cause.”

“I have no opinion on Women’s Suffrage,” he answers honestly. “Which includes no malice towards it. It is not my right to vote to have, Miss Niima.”

“But it is everything you stand to lose, Officer Solo, if you require a partner that is your equal.”

She stands, while he is struck dumb, at the foot of the station steps. 

He is so gobsmacked he almost forgets she cannot merely walk away from him after delivering this blow. She’s handcuffed. She can’t go anywhere. 

With a sigh, he takes her elbow gently. 

“I do not like to be pressured into being rough with you. I do not like being made into a brute, Miss Niima, as a man tasked with upholding the laws you are flagrantly breaking.”

“Are you asking  _ me _ to be gentle, Officer Solo?”

She jerks her handcuffed wrists to make him have to recover his hold. He scrambles to do so.

“As so fits your sex, yes, Miss Niima. Perhaps the matter will resolve itself if you and that army of harpies did just that.”

“Does my soft voice make you listen?”

It did, but he had sharper memory of her fiery one on his hours off, he would never admit out loud. Still, her whispering as he escorts her inside does bid him closer. 

“As a matter of fact...” he mutters, more to himself than to her, but she smirks up at him. 

He realizes too late he is caught in the warm flames of her reckoning.

Her smile is radiant in the afternoon sun; she really is a pretty thing and it will be the death of him. 

"Then seeing as _we will be seeing a lot more of each other,_ Officer Solo, consider this an extension of friendship. As you have so nobly requested: you shall be the only Policeman I will ever be gentle with."

He clears his throat gruffly, the entryway of the station filled with her intoxicating aura. And the entire station filled with the sound of her voice; making her announcement. 

Making clear his request that she indeed be gentle with him, the tall brute.

Everyone heard it. 

Mitaka, with his eye still bruised purple, looks terribly hurt by her promise in particular.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! If the first scene of this chapter seems a little familiar, it's because it was originally posted on tumblr as a gift/bonus scene to [jeeno2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeeno2/pseuds/jeeno2) over the holidays!

It’s her third arrest; by now it’s a science between them. An art. A costume change for a theatrical performance. 

Rehearsed, timely, and practical. 

  
Ben pats her down with his gloved hands using the efficiency of a chambermaid standing by with a towel after a bath. It’s that quick too, like she’ll get cold. 

She knows where to put her hands while he checks her petticoats for weapons. They talk about the seasons changing, the crowds at Piccadilly Circus where she was picketing when she got picked up, colds that are going around, her students. 

  
There is a secretary, a matron of the police station, who assists for tenderer areas. 

  
He allows her some modesty for _that_ search.

  
She likes to look deeply into his eyes when she’s searched by the matron; her smile smug and scheming under the wide brim of her hat. Until she has to take it off, and have her hair pins removed, her hair plaited neatly behind her once the pins are placed in an envelope of possessions that will be returned to her upon her release.

  
He feels his stomach coil when she smiles at him, he’s had women of much more reduced stature than hers _proposition_ him in this very room because of his uniform; but he is unsettled because her beguiling look is not a proposition. It appears to be quite the opposite, in her smugness, so he keeps his distance and tries to catch his breath in the moments the matron spares him responsibility of her. 

  
Until he is drawn back to Miss Niima with a light to inspect her mouth for foreign objects.

  
Her pink tongue extends when he grasps her chin in his gloved hands, the matron stepping back and often, with her fondness for cigarettes, sneaking out of the room entirely once her duty has been fulfilled to smoke in the courtyard. He hates this. Time alone with Rey is dangerous. He searches inside her mouth, her pretty teeth and soft throat, with careful eyes. 

The mechanics of her throat squeezing with a swallow, for example, make him have to stop and start over again with a clear head.

  
“I always feel like a racehorse you wish to purchase when you do this,” she whispers upon her third arrest, and his stomach flips. “Inspecting me.”

  
“I’m checking for concealed weapons,” he keeps his tone measured and bored, a consummate professional, but he hasn’t removed his hand from her chin.

  
“You’re _very_ thorough,” she murmurs, her breath brushing his neck.

  
He coughs, a little too abruptly, and isn’t fast enough to move without coughing directly in her face. She curls her lips shut in time, but his hand remains on her jaw. Maybe squeezing her chin too tightly, until he remembers himself and releases his grip. 

Before he let go, those cheeks looked ripe to bursting over the edges of his fingers. 

How many women of reduced circumstances had entered this station with the mind to seduce him, and failed miserably, and yet by breathing Miss Niima has him feeling light in the head, persuaded, to handing off a key to her?

  
He shuts his light off, stepping away.

  
“I’m thorough so you will not do harm to yourself, in custody. Or to others.”

  
He carefully signs off on her _thorough_ search in his ledger. 

“But mostly to yourself.”

  
She is as undressed as she will be until someone bails her out of the city jail; so she wears her day dress and no accessories that could stab, strangle, or be grabbed in a fight. 

  
“Such care you take for me, Officer Solo.”

  
He swallows the feeling of discomfort that rises in his throat as he puts her restraints back on to lead her to her holding cell. 

  
“I take it as my duty, Miss Niima.”

 

* * *

 

Her shoulders sag, but she stays on that ugly, rotten-wood bench in the cell four hours, ignoring him once again.

Rey just waits, clicking her teeth rhythmically. 

She’s remarkably good at that. Waiting.

Whereas he has been staring at the tinned lunch he brought himself and can’t bear to eat it while she’s  _ staring _ at him. He’s never minded taking lunch at his desk before now. Prostitutes leering at the way he chews. Murders watching every bite with a smirk. 

Suffragettes like her screeching with indignation that  _ he could eat when his country was kept in bondage. _

It feels  _ rude _  of him with her watching.

Her stare isn't even covetous, or judgmental. 

She lets him fill in all the gaps of her amused expression until he feels itchy with anxiety.

There’s a moment when he tries to bite into the mushrooms on toast leftover from the night before where she raises her eyebrows as if to say  _ ‘how about it then?’ _ and it makes him feel _dirty._

Prostitutes have offered, in the height of his loneliness, to put his cock in their mouth, and his was steadfast in his rejection of those offers. Yet demure Miss Niima keeps looking at him like she's not offering. 

Like she's already doing it.

And the worst part is, she doesn't seem fully aware that she's doing it, just that what it is gets a rise out of him. Just that it makes him fidget and blush like a schoolgirl.

With a sigh, he raises from his chair and the mountain of paperwork she’s left him to deal with.

“When have you last eaten?”

It’s not the first time he’s shared his food, there are a lot of empty stomachs in full jail cells, but Rey looks at the other half of toast in a tin box and shakes her head.

“I’m not very fond of mushrooms,” she says neatly, her hands folded in her lap, as her stomach growls. 

The sound stretches awkwardly between them. 

Again, he feels brutish. And silly.

He withdraws the offer, blushing, and returns to his seat.

“Fine, then,” he goes back to his desk. He wishes he could eat the half she rejected, but his mouth feels unexpectedly dry.

He shouldn’t expect her to like him. He  _ arrested _ her, not this time, but other times. And would likely have to do it again.

“You missed a hair pin,” she calls from across the room, divided by a cage wall. “I may use it to stab myself in the eye.”

“Please refrain from doing that, Miss Niima.”

“I lack the restraint...I lack the constitution...I am so frail, Officer Solo, weak to my own impulses. I need a man to control me.”

He glanced up from the scrawl of his pen.

“So your detractors are correct, then? How horrible for your cause. Shall I take a written statement now that Suffrage is all for naught?”

Her jaw tenses for only a second, but the tension between them goes slack when her eyes flicker to the clock on the wall and she goes back to just...waiting.

She does so quite effortlessly for hours. 

Until an officer goes to unlock the cage, summoning her by a crude tone applied to her pretty name. 

Ben watches from his desk as she gathers herself.

“You’ve made bail,” Mitaka’s voice is sour, his bruise-purpled face pinched. His eye is still quite nasty from the other day. “Your employer has wired the funds to secure your release.”

She hops up from the bench like a pupil at the end of a long school day, as though she’s heard the bell, and the same lightness with which she drifts out of her cell does warm him considerably to her.

A naughty pupil, that’s what she looks like, that’s all that it is. He’s had his fair share of trouble in his schooldays. 

It was something in her eyes. Not resignation, but charm. Lightness.

There was hope for her yet. 

“Are you  _ trying _ to go to prison, Miss Niima?” he asks genuinely. She stops in front of his desk. Looking confused by his curiosity, “The whole ordeal? Hunger striking, force feedings, the lot of it?”

“If it is demanded of me,” she straightens as he hands her the envelope of her personal effects.

And one parasol that did not fit inside it. 

Mitaka makes a beeline away from her once it is back in her hands.

She must think she's very brave, standing prim in front of his desk and flaunting her misdeeds like a dropped handkerchief for him to pick up for her.

“It’s what I must do, Officer. Even if it is not pleasant.”

He can’t hide his smile.

“Would you like to get a pie with me?”

“I _ -what?” _

She steps back, her brow furrowing.

He’s really knocked her off her stride with this, clearly. And it pleases him to see the flush to her cheeks.

He stands from his seat behind his desk, pushing the chair in before he continues, “I typically work through lunch, but you have not eaten, and now neither have I. Would you like to get a pie with me?”

She swallows, pursing her lips at him. Thinking it over.

“It only seems fair, since you didn’t seem to like mushrooms much either.”

"That settles it," he takes her elbow like a gentleman, like his mother taught him, and leads the way. She keeps pace enough that no one could say she followed him.

When they exit the station together, he can see Mitaka cowering while he hid from her in the hallway of the washrooms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [lilithsaur, my love, did this amazing art for this story!](https://twitter.com/lilithsaur/status/1083884411635068928)


	4. Chapter 4

He should have been warned when she removed her gloves in preparation to eat the pie he handed her. 

Cornish pastries were shaped to be held and eaten away from a table headed somewhere like a mine or a dockyard; ideal to eat while walking, so his motivations might not have been totally pure. 

It happened to be a lovely day. He would walk home with his. 

Maybe she could walk with him with hers.

He kept his gloves on, as he usually did when he came to this shop after work, but Rey peeled hers off while he made their order as though performing a surgery.

So when Rey begins to feast: he can’t help but watch with some little horror. 

And a little delight.

"Hungry?"

"Yes," she admits, as though forgetting her sneer at the mushrooms on toast earlier.

"That strike didn't hold out long," he teases.

She licks oil off her thumb. "You're off-duty, Officer Solo, and so am I. I would prefer we act like it."

“Where are you headed?” he falls into step beside her; her pace while eating is also just as wild and unencumbered. An ungainly, determined stride. It’s unclear where she’s going other than away from the crowds of workers trying to get a meal in as they run off to wherever they’re going. 

Pie shops are not meant to be patronized leisurely in this part of town. 

“Lincoln’s Inn House,” she smirks when he cringes.

She’s got onion on her cheek. 

“Predictably,” he responds with a mild tone.

“What? WSPU headquarters are nothing to sneer at. I have to debrief my most recent arrest.”

He looks bashfully down at the cobblestones. He’s off duty. He can be a little softer with her, now that they aren’t on warring fronts.

They stand outside the shop; each armed with a handpie. Hers was chicken and leek; he chose a steak and ale. His usual. There was a need for red meat in his diet at his size, being a bachelor, he had to get it outside the comforts of his modest lodgings.

It flashes in his mind-

Little Miss Niima: in their _proper_ house, cooking him a roast when he came home from work. Lace and pastry and smiles.

-It hurt his throat to think of it.

He wonders what she’s used to eating; wolfing hers down like a street urchin. Surely she had to teach those little girls decorum, table manners…

If he ever heard her utter the words to guide someone to what fork they were supposed to use with what course after seeing her like this; he’d die on sight.

Picturing her teaching etiquette with her nose curled at the irony is getting him halfway to his grave already.

They’ve acquired their lunch. The most natural thing to do seems to re-enter the real world by parting ways. Back to their respective corners. A brief armistice brought on by pie.

“Would you care for an escort?”

But she nods, as if to herself, around a jaw-unhinging bite of oily pastry.

She really amazes him sometimes.

“I don’t need one.”

“But I’d find it pleasant to walk with you.”

“Oh,” her freckled, slightly pastry-flecked cheeks flush. “I didn’t expect you to like me much. Considering.”

“The politics or the relentless teasing?”

She snorts out a laugh.

They fall into step beside each other. He’s enjoying his pie, but it’s nothing compared to how she feels about hers. It’s vanished from her hands as if into thin air before the shop is even out of sight.

He pinches off the corner of his pastry, a chunk of steak steaming in a little swaddle of dough, and offers it to her.

It’s not the most respectable gesture. Forward. Not very clean.

But she brightens nonetheless.

“Thank you,” She takes the neat bite a little more gently than her own pie that she wolfed down. “That’s really kind.”

She seems amazed by the offering. 

“You enjoyed the chicken so much I figured you wouldn’t mind a sample.”

His smile is shy.

She nudges him with her elbow.

“You  _ do _ like me.”

“I...of course I do.”

His ears turn red, hoping she’ll drop it now that they are on kinder terms, but she stops walking and swivels towards him.

“Your fondness is apparent, on second thought. I think this is the first time a policeman has escorted a woman to Lincoln’s Inn House.”

Her smile is mischievous. He fights the blush that rises on his cheeks that appears now whenever she teases him. His ears are already a lost cause.

They cut their path off through Parliament Square. Rey nudges his elbow with hers as they pass the Buxton Memorial Fountain.

Abolitionist memorial...

He closed his eyes. 

So she thought herself an "abolitionist" like the rest of them. As though a few less rights made them slaves.

As they walk past a newsstand, and Ben flinches at the headline of The Daily Chronicle:

**SUFFRAGETTES AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM. CASE SMASHED WITH A CHOPPER.**

It was such a waste. Attacking museum exhibits with an axe to make a point about suffrage. 

“You are uncomfortable,” Miss Niima observes, her voice steady. 

They both stare at the other newspaper heading.

**MILITANT OUTRAGES...MUMMY CASE SMASHED AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM.**

“I...destruction of an _artifact._ What good does that do all of us?”

“Hmmph,” Rey’s tone is a disapproving. “Officer Solo, can women curate museums?”

He took a reluctant inhale. He had meant for a nice walk, just the two of them. Peace. 

She really had a habit with ambushing him on these issues.

“In your line of thinking;  _ they can do anything they want to.” _

“And yet. Can you name a woman curator?”

He is silent. She had a point to make.

“Women art collectors? Women  _ artists? _ I can count on one hand, Officer, the ones displayed in the Tate. Women are supposed to consume laudanum and become pneumonics in order to be relevant in artistic spheres, and that's just as a painting. An object. When our history, our culture, is filtered by men, what do we leave out?”

Her steps are brisk. He watches her little black boots fan out the lace of her petticoat. Almost forgets to keep up even with his longer strides.

Her expression is determined.

“We might as well have never existed at all? So what can artifacts of that kind mean to us women? When we are kept out of preservation, of creation, out of regulation? Property, culture, history?”

She draws up short of him. Her brow furrows.

_ “You’re smiling at me Officer Solo.” _

It is a cold accusation. Not an observation.

His face falls. 

“Was I?”

“Yes,” she looks taken aback, shy herself over this thing that she has noticed. “Are you laughing at me?”

He looks down at the walking path.

“I don’t think I am.”

He means it. She just makes him happy.

“Oh,” she swivels forward on the path, instead of facing him. They fall into step again. 

They exit the park. That makes for a faster pace on the city streets. He mourns the quieter time spent walking through the grass.

“I’ll never curate a museum,” he blurts out.

She looks pointedly at him, stepping aside for a speeding passerby. 

He blushes again. “I think it’s different for us, being...well…”

Not educated for it. Not in the right circles.

Though that might be his own fault-

“Working class?” she offers.

He nods. 

It was. Even if Miss Niima did have family; she could walk with him on her day off by living in a place of employ, not at home. There was no parlor for him to go and kneel and ask for approval. She had no parlor: she was given her room through Kenobi in a servant’s quarters. 

He _liked_ the freedom to walk with her on a Saturday, to speak plainly, to spend his earnings on a pie and not have to leave calling cards or bow to a debutante. She didn’t seem to understand that many of these Suffragettes were spoiled, fussy little women who hosted fancy teas and embroidered their politics instead of flowers onto lace handkerchiefs and used hard-working, age-earning women like her for optics. Had her stain her nice clothes for optics. Sit in a jail cell for optics. 

_ Did their leaders- _

-Did their leaders care about her wages being forfeit, with their fathers’ fortunes sitting in bank accounts being managed by their husbands?

Rey, who had no fortune to lose, who had increased societal pressure to conform. 

Did _they_ care about Rey as he did?

He finds in this moment that he cared about her very much.

“You’re just a foot soldier to them, Rey.”

She actually laughs. 

“I like the sound of that.”

She stops at his side at the way his mouth twists.

"It seems a great deal of waste of _you,"_ he admits softly, shamefully. there was so much of her. Luminous and warm and bright.

She smiles sympathetically up at him, like this is all just too much for him to handle.

“It is chivalrous of you, truly, to doubt them for using me. But I give myself willingly, Officer Solo, when I feel it is for the right reasons. And I ask you to respect the choice I have made for myself.”

He clear his throat. “We find ourselves at our eternal impasse again, Miss Niima.”

“It’s fine company,” she touches his elbow, almost making him faint, “I should like to ask you to call me ‘Rey.’”

Lightness fills him.

“You should like to?”

“Yes. But you always whisper when you say  _ Miss Niima. _ And I like that more.”

Her grin was feral in how pleased it was with his resulting blush.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Research Party!
> 
> Women were banned from the British Museum without a male escort or a letter of recommendation in 1914 over a Suffragette attacking a display with an axe. 
> 
> https://blog.britishmuseum.org/suffragettes-and-the-british-museum/
> 
> Buxton Memorial Fountain used to reside in Parliament Square, now it's in Victoria Tower Gardens...near the memorial to Emmeline Pankhurst. 
> 
> We're now in early spring of 1914. Rey and Ben are in the early stages of courtship. I wonder what world-altering event is headed their way in June?


	5. Chapter 5

They are to part from each other at Lincoln’s Inn House. It only makes sense to do so. It is where they exit their promenade and go back to what their uniforms demand of them.

She was to report there immediately after her arrest; they all were, to debrief. Is she thought it through better, she’d have split their paths earlier on. Instead, she found herself on the sidewalk before it with an Officer on her arm.

There are a few young women seated on the outside steps in the sunshine. Paige and Tallie: crisp and pretty like white lilies.

He does not notice it, but Tallie’s got her hand in Paige’s, and they do always drape over each other so gracefully. They are too dear of friends to Rey for her to use words like “indecent” to describe their touches: and the more comfortable she has become around these two in the past few months the more she realized _indecent_ is not a word to describe whatever did occur there between them.

She is curious, shamefully so, how they had successfully freed their lives from men in _all_ ways.

But much too shy to ask.

She’s properly interrupted their show before Officer Solo would know to notice. They balk at Ben in his uniform, and Rey still on his arm, and drop hands.

This is perhaps the first time an officer has taken a woman to the WSPU Headquarters and not pulled her kicking and screaming from it instead.

“This is a permitted meeting house,” Tallie is on her feet at the base of the steps in an instant, “and we are not breaking the law by assembling here, Officer-”

Rey puts a hand up between them, trying to remove the taste of onion from her tongue before she calls off her friends. It requires a moment of rough smacking against the roof of her mouth, Solo cups a hand to her back as if he suspects she is choking.

“Tallie, it’s alright. Officer Solo was just escorting me safely back to my sisters in arms after my most recent arrest,” she pats his elbow firmly, not relinquishing it because the large man hanging on her seems frightened by gutsy Tallie and Paige looking cool and fierce at her elbow.

He still angles his body slightly behind hers, staring down politely but uncomfortably for Tallie’s inquisition.

“I have no cause to arrest you for being here, though those words compose you in quite an innocent-seeming guise, madam.”

Rey tries to hold back a laugh, and digs her elbow gently into his side. He glances nervously down at her, but seems to recognize the nudge as not disciplinary with the humor in her own eyes.

Tallie is less than amused.

“I see you’ve made a friend on the inside, Rey,” Paige rarely betrays anything in her calm exterior; but Rey would dare call it humor in her eyes at the sight of them together. “Did he tie nosegays to the bars to woo you?”

Rey laughs in spite of herself.

Officer Solo looks very much intimidated in the territory of the enemy. And the questioning.

“Gathering intel?” Tallie levels at him when she catches him looking up and down over the building. “Rey, what have you told him?”

“That I was grateful for the pie,” she turns to her escort’s stupefied face, “at least, I was going to. Thank you for the walk home, Officer Solo. And the lunch. It was exemplary public service. I should like to be arrested so chivalrously _every_ time.”

“Not to encourage this habit, but I’d like to see you again,” he blurts out, red-faced. “If you’d like.”

Rey’s eyebrows shoot up. She had imagined he’d drop her like a hot iron when they arrived, especially with witnesses of _her_ sort watching them.

She cracks a smile.

“Perhaps without meeting in a jail cell,” he adds.

His blush delights and softens her like both a mother and a wicked child.

“My day off is always Saturday.”

Paige, cool but kind-hearted, is reading her mind and scribbling something down on a piece of paper:

“As Miss Niima has no calling cards printed, I shall act as her social secretary.”

She hands the address of Rey’s employ under on Mr. Kenobi to Ben Solo.

There is also a scrawl underneath that passes under Rey’s eyes first before the paper flutters into Ben’s gloved hand:

_Touch her wrong and you will burn, Officer._

Paige was a dear friend.

Officer Solo neatly takes the paper, and the threat, with a careful pleasantness.

He turns to Rey to confirm her consent to the meeting.

“At three?” she finds herself wistfully asking, “I have a few errands first.”

“Perhaps I could take you to a museum, then,” he is blushing as he adds, “should you be in need of an escort.”

She is delighted and horrified by the joke, boldly cracked on the WSPU doorstep no less, especially coming from someone so reserved.

“I shall think on how to punish you for that joke all week.”

He smiles down at her, a hint of wickedness in his usually serious eyes.

“Just keep those errands to acts that are strictly your legal right, Miss Niima. I shall come for you at three O’Clock.”

“Well, that narrows it down for just us women,” Paige crosses her arms and mutters from her seat on the step, “so Rey can just knit for a week.”

Rey ignores her because she is receiving a rather gallant kiss on the hand.

Tallie clearly still doesn’t like it, but it feels like nothing but good fun when Officer Solo shakes her hand respectfully before taking his leave of them.

“Have you gone,” Tallie’s arms slither around her waist and squeeze until Rey shrieks when her feet are lifted clear off the pavement, _“completely blooming mad?”_

Paige grabs at Rey’s kicking feet while all three of them laugh. Her hat nearly slips from her head. She notices people passing by on the street glaring at them: their disapproval obviously in disliking _noisy, unkempt suffragettes._

She cares little. These friends are all she has in this world.

“No,” she gasped breathlessly, but Paige is chiming in gleefully:

“I see someone has friends in high places.”

“Were you making eyes at him while he prepared your force-feeding tubes?”

Rey sobers slightly, but the sun in the sky is too bright and vivacious to fight her smile, even with Paige and Tallie demanding answers she doesn’t fully understand yet either.

Officer Solo was a simple policeman, he took her to a jail cell, not prison. He’d never partake in something so ghastly.

He is just...an enforcer in the system that was broken.

“We keep bumping into each other. And when he does drag me into the station, it is done so very respectfully,” she pretends to swoon into the railing of the steps. Paige manages a laugh but Tallie is somber. “He is only doing his job.”

“You have distracted us far too well, Rey,” Paige nudges the glare clear off Tallie’s face. She has such an effect on Tallie that way. “For there is much news to be shared after your debrief.”

As if spurned to life, Tallie takes her arm to lead her up the steps.

“What?” Rey asks, Tallie’s swiftness almost knocking her hat off her head, “what is it?”

The girls seem intent for this not to be said in the street, or even in the parlor where just anyone can hear them.

It is not until the are nearing Miss Mothma’s office that they close in on her with awed reverence:

“She is come out of hiding for one night,” Tallie is impatient to be the one to deliver the news.

Rey is breathless with excitement.

“She is? It is not too dangerous?”

Paige paints in the details.

“It is of utmost secrecy. We will follow the cab escorting her to the location in a march. No one will know what the event truly is until she is already speaking. By the time police are involved, she will be spirited away back to hiding.”

She had begun to feel like just a myth until now.

“We shall really get to see her,” Rey whispers, like the sound of her voice will jinx it, “Leia Organa.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so excited for Emmeline Pankhurst Fugitive Leia Organa.


End file.
